Gruccis: 'Fake' Fireworks Were Real, CGI on TV in Chinese Hands

Footprint fireworks broadcast from the Olympics' opening ceremony turned out to be the months-long work of CGI masters, and now the team behind the real fireworks are coming clean about what went down in the China sky.

We love fireworks, but from now on, will we have to see them in person to believe them? This weekend, a Chinese newspaper broke the story that some of the fireworks footage from the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was prepared digitally in advance of the broadcast. The Beijing Times reported that the recording of 29 firework footprints walking across the Beijing sky was computer-generated and prepared months--yes, months--ahead of time by deft CGI programmers. The fireworks in question were actually fired off that evening, and a few of them even made it into the broadcast. But because the Beijing Organizing Committee knew that filming fireworks progressing across the city sky would be a logistical and security nightmare, it didn't assign a helicopter to follow the footprints as they ignited. Most of the footprint fireworks that the television audience saw at home (and on screens inside the stadium) were prepared in advance on a computer.

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There's some controversy now as to whether NBC, which broadcast the ceremony 12 hours after it happened, properly informed viewers that they were not, in fact, watching real fireworks in what was one of the most highly rated programs of the year. At the time, host Matt Lauer called the footprints "almost animation," leading many to believe that the fireworks were trying to imitate animation by "walking" across the sky--not that what they were watching was physically animated. It's unclear how much the network actually knew at the time of the broadcast. NBC officials and technical crew members did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.

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One person who certainly didn't know about the CGI mix-in was M. Philip Butler, a vice president at Fireworks by Grucci who calls himself "Chief Operating Brother-in-Law" of the company. (His wife, Donna Grucci, is its president.) Fireworks by Grucci is one of the country's pre-eminent fireworks innovators; the company was hired by the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee to help engineer the presentation. Butler says that he was watching the fireworks at home in the U.S. and when the footprints started he was seriously impressed. But when he rewound to watch them again, Butler realized that they were just too perfect to be true.

On Monday, Butler gave his honest appraisal to PM: "I said to myself, 'How in the world would they do that?' Now I'm wondering, 'Why in the world would they do it?' " Of the rest of the performance, he said, "I don't think I'll ever see it again in my lifetime, it was so spectacular," adding, "so why did they have to put something fake in there?"

Butler's nephew Phil Grucci is in China now and has been traveling back and forth to the country frequently for over a year as a pyrotechnic designer and chief engineer for the ceremonies. In an interview from Beijing, he stressed that there was nothing fake about the fireworks. While he conceded that the fact that some of the video wasn't live "was unfortunate," to call the fireworks fake would be an error: "I don't want to taint the fact that those footprints really happened," Grucci says. "For people who saw it live, it was a spectacular scene."

Phil Grucci knew in advance that the Chinese had what he calls a "pre-recorded version of what happened," but he didn't know the extent to which it would be used in the broadcast or if it would be used at all.

The Grucci family frequently mounts fireworks for events that must be engineered around high levels of security--the company has done the pyrotechnics for three other Olympic games and for inaugurations for the last four U.S. presidents. But Phil Grucci called the security in Beijing "unprecedented," explaining that the one helicopter over the Bird's Nest stadium couldn't capture all the fireworks by itself. Though the events Grucci works on have high security, he doesn't anticipate that any event producer he works with will have to rely on preimaged footage again.

Revelations about CGI fireworks--even if they were real on the ground--may lead viewers to be less impressed by televised creative and innovative fireworks in the future. Phil Grucci tells PM that during the 14 months he worked with China on the presentation, the R&D led to huge steps forward for fireworks technology. He plans to take advantage of the developments that he worked on in Beijing in the next big Grucci spectacle. But when he does, will the television audience be able to believe its eyes?

Fireworks explode over the Forbidden City during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics on August 8, 2008 in Beijing, China. (Photograph by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images) Inset: The fireworks as they appeared on NBC's TV broadcast. (Image Courtesy of NBC)